The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [93]
Well, I didn’t use to think she was funny, but now I realize she’s like completely out of control, nuts. I just never noticed it. I sort of took it all seriously, you know, and acted like it was normal. Now I realize that she’s funny to watch at least 60 percent of the time, like the way it’s funny to watch a baby panda fall over stuff at the zoo. I finally started taping her phone calls when I worked in Saturday Night Live. I couldn’t believe that someone could go on like that, and I realized that I’d been listening to that my whole life. I mean, you can really hear her mind work. I steal her stuff all the time.
Can you think of an example?
Well, not really. I mean, I steal so much that sometimes Brian will laugh, and he’ll say, “Mother.” If I’d started paying attention to my mother when I was twelve instead of trying to sneak out the door and avoid her, not only could I have handled her a little better, but I could have gotten a much better education about women and about people. But it was a fear of the unknown, I guess. Now she’s become a show-business mother. She’s gone around the bend. I remember when she came out to Hollywood one time, and we took her to the Polo Lounge. Brian called Doug Kenney [cofounder of the National Lampoon and cowriter of National Lampoon’s Animal House] and said, “Page my mother at the Polo Lounge.” So this guy who looks like a Mexican general walks through, saying “Lucille Murray, Lucille Murray” at the top of his lungs, and the entire Polo lounge is looking around for Lucille Murray, and she gets up to, like, visual applause from the entire crowd. And all of a sudden, she just snapped. She started talking like Photoplay magazine circa 1959, about Eddie Fisher and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton and all this stuff. For about six or seven weeks she was completely around the corner. She would call me up and say stuff like, “Well, they have to come to you now.” I mean, we’d taken her into our dark little world, and now she was a show-business authority. It was insane. This was my mother, this was the woman who’d said to me, “Couldn’t you be happy doing community theater?” And now she was cutting my deal for me.
When had she said that about the community theater?
Just in the beginning, after Second City. Maybe she said it to Brian, actually. She didn’t see any money in acting, even though Brian had gotten good reviews in Chicago and was really great in the show. Or it may have been in the period when he’d gone out to Hollywood and tried to get different kinds of work and was starving again. She said, “This is not working. Couldn’t you try community theater?” She wanted him to do anything to make some dough. “Fine, you’re having a ball, but I still have an eight-year-old to feed at home.” I mean, how she managed to get all the rest of the family raised is amazing. How my father did it on the money he made was amazing.
When did you first work with Belushi?
I might have improvised with him once or twice at Second City. But I didn’t work with him until I got to New York. It was on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. John was one of the producers. He dragged all these people to New York—Flaherty and Harold and Brian—and got them on the radio. A lot of people stayed at his place. Then he put The National Lampoon Show together, and we went on tour—Philadelphia, Ontario, Toronto, Long Island. That was in 1975. Later we opened off-Broadway in a place called the New Palladium. I was Belushi’s roommate on the road. We drank a lot of Rolling Rock in those days.
You mean you weren’t doing coke all night long?
No, no, no. We didn’t have any money to do coke. Coke wasn’t a big deal anyway at that time.
Were you doing any drugs?
Oh, smoking grass. But basically we were juicers at that time. At most of these gigs, we got free drinks, so we drank. We were still starving actors, so we had to get whatever perks we could get. We drank Champa Tampas at the New Palladium, champagne and orange juice. It was a special there. And it’s a great drink to work on because it’s got that sugar